Currently a user may create accounts with a plurality of different online services. Such services can include but are not limited to social networking services, professional networking services, a broadcasting service that broadcasts messages from users and followers or to a public stream, a blogging service, a photo upload and retention service, a service that allows users to rate movies and/or music amongst, other services. For each of these services the user creates an online account and has an identity corresponding to such account that represents the user. These identities can refer to an actual name of the user, a nickname of the user, a pseudonym, etc.
Each of these online services generally operates independently from other online services. Accordingly, conventionally it is difficult to disambiguate identities corresponding to a user across several online services. For example, a searcher may wish to search for a user by name through utilization of a search engine. When the searcher queries for “Tom Smith”, for instance, a search engine can return a set of separate results, many of which may be correct (e.g., the search engine returns search results that relate to the “Tom Smith” being searched for by the user). Such results, however, are conventionally entirely disjoined. For example, the search engine may return Tom Smith on a first online service, Tom Smith on a second online service, etc. Each of these is returned as separate search result. Thus, the search engine is entirely unaware that each of the search results is separate online representations of the user Tom Smith.
This problem is compounded if more than one Tom Smith has accounts corresponding to online services that can be searched by way of the search engine. Accordingly, the user searching for Tom Smith may be provided a plurality of different search results, which may or may not correspond to the Tom Smith being searched for by the user. Additionally a user searching for a particular individual currently has no means for quickly ascertaining which online services are subscribed to by the individual. Continuing with the Tom Smith example, the searcher will be unable to quickly ascertain whether or not a Tom Smith of interest uses a particular online services or set of online services.